Dark Messiah - Review @ GameZone

November 20th, 2006, 12:19

7/10 is the verdict for Dark Messiah at GameZone. Here's the opening paragraph:

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic marks a real departure for the long-running RPG franchise. Whereas other entries were pretty much straight forward RPG, Dark Messiah puts itself more in the “thinking man’s FPS” type of quest, employing open-ended RPG elements and cinematic FPS action. Not only that, but the game also utilizes the Source engine, making for some truly impressive physics and nice graphical effects. Unfortunately, while the game almost nails the formula, it falls victim to a bevy of technical flaws and bugs that render the game unplayable at times. Dark Messiah has a lot of good ideas going in, but ultimately gets bogged down with stability issues.

I played the game two times in a row ( having the first path installed during the first pass ) and I have seen only one issue : The game crashed one time after a long session ( 4 hours or more ).
No slowdowns, no quest..err objective problems.
And I have a nVidia card.
It's strange to see so many articles talking about "bugs that makes the game unplayable".
Maybe I was simply lucky ?

I found Dark Messiah to be one of the most frustratingly buggy games I've ever encountered -- at first. I doubt I've ever had more crashes or drops-to-desktop in any game, and the slowdowns in that first outdoor level were ridiculous.

I turned off HDR and as the game progressed, it seemed to get much more stable but I can understand the criticisms.

Also, those of us who had 'pre-loaded' and were ready to play on day of release on our lunch hours were sorely disappointed that the pre-load was incomplete, the first real load was missing critical things, and it wasn't for a couple of days that they had patched things to working.